More details were leaking out about the contest. Marta had it on good authority that $5,000 was at stake here—an astonishing sum for a gardening contest!—and that could just be the beginning. Marta had spilled the beans to Dr. Sproot about it. But that was under duress, when Dr. Sproot threatened her again in the most indelicate way with legal action and character assassination.
Gazing thoughtfully over Dr. Sproot’s grounds, Marta found herself still admiring them. But what was it that was missing? It was some ineffable void that made these gardens too contrived, too consciously manipulated for perfection to be perfection.
Marta heard a toilet flush from within the house. She found herself startled at the sound of the sliding screen door and Dr. Sproot’s sudden appearance at her side. Marta forced a wan smile.
“Your gardens are looking in peak condition, even in all this dryness, Dr. Sproot.”
“Yes, aren’t they? Thank you, Marta. But we’re not here to discuss the condition of my gardens, as wonderful as they might be, are we.”
“No, Dr. Sproot, I suppose we aren’t.”
“We’re here to further flesh out some details of our little plan.”
“Yes, Dr. Sproot.”
“Let’s head on inside. I have something to show you. We’re going to turn you into a crackerjack backyard spy or my name isn’t Dr. Phyllis Sproot.”
Marta stared in disbelief into Dr. Sproot’s bedroom mirror. There she was, modeling a brown, woolen, and hooded cowl far too long for her, and girded around her waist with a rope. A large pair of sunglasses covered about half her face.
“It’s a crackerjack disguise, don’t you see,” Dr. Sproot said as a mortified Marta looked at the ridiculous figure she cut in the mirror. “With the hood pulled over your head, and those sunglasses covering your face, no one will have a clue who you are. That is, unless you’re caught. If you are caught and detained, you are in no way to reveal your true identity, or mine . . . especially not mine. I have a reputation to preserve, and if it was to be discovered that I was having you run around spying on other people’s gardens for me, well, you can imagine the fallout. Now, you, Marta, on the other hand, have very little to lose. You have no real standing in gardening circles, and your own yard is an absolute disaster, and . . .”
The words kept swarming around Marta. She resisted the temptation to make quick, dispelling motions with her hands, hidden in the billowing sleeves of the bulky garment.
“Actually, this is a costume I wore for Halloween one year, oh gosh, twenty-five years ago, when Mort and I were in our wild and crazy years. Ha-ha. It got quite a few comments, I’ll tell you, Marta. So, you could pretend to be a scarecrow. Or a monk. There is a monastery in Livia, you know, for those monks whose mission is making those glazed, hard-as-a-rock caramel candies. You could be one of them. Now stretch out your arms.”
Marta obeyed mindlessly.
“We don’t want those sleeves too long, do we? You will be having to use those hands to write down observations and take pictures. Lots of pictures. Hmmmm, let’s see. I’ll have to pin those back a little . . . and . . .”
Marta closed her eyes, lost in the self-abasement of having stooped so low and her own timidity in failing to resist this ridiculous charade in all but the meekest, most halfhearted, and queasy-voiced way.
“But remember what you promised me,” Dr. Sproot said when Marta balked at her assignment after trying on the cowl. “You promised to help me as penance for damaging my vocal cords and as surety for my not destroying whatever little reputation it is that you have. Remember? Now, this won’t hurt a bit, Marta. All you have to do is take your notes on whatever you see sprouting from their accursed soil, take pictures—lots and lots and lots of pictures—and bring them all back to me. There will also be some night duty, and a little snipping . . .”
“A little what?”
“Snipping.”
“Snipping?”
“Yes, snipping. You will visit the Fremonts’ yard late at night—four or five nights’ worth of work will probably do the trick—and snip off the blooms and buds of various and sundry Fremont flora. A few at a time so as to avoid notice, but we must, over time, do enough damage to prevent these Fremonts from, by some freak accident, actually winning the Burdick’s Best Yard Contest or, more to the point, preventing me from winning the Burdick’s Best Yard Contest. We can’t assume they won’t hear about it. We can’t assume they won’t enter. We can probably assume that, no matter what happens, I will win anyway, but why take chances? We’ll call our little snipping exercise the ‘death-by-a-thousand-cuts’ treatment.”
“But, Dr. Sproot, I don’t want to do that. That’s vandalism!”
Dr. Sproot smiled.
“No, dear, that is not vandalism. There will be no great loss to the Fremonts, only a few buds and blooms snipped off here and there. They probably won’t even notice. And, by doing so, you’ll be preserving the integrity of what I’ve worked so hard to build and nurture here in Livia. Take that away, Marta, and you have stupid people raised to positions of fame and importance all because of a little blind luck. Can’t have that, can we, Marta?”
“Dr. Sproot,” said Marta, her voice quivering with uncertainty. “I just don’t think I should be doing this.”
What Dr. Sproot did next sealed the deal. She walked over to the counter that separated her dining room from her kitchen, retrieved several papers, and handed them to Marta. One bore the letterhead of an attorney and was addressed to Dr. Sproot. It said that she had valid grounds for a lawsuit against Marta and could recover thousands of dollars as a result of such an injury as Marta had caused through her criminal negligence. Criminal negligence! The others were letters addressed by Dr. Sproot to the presidents of Livia’s four gardening clubs. They described in exaggerated detail the scalding tea incident and recommended that Marta be excluded from every officially sanctioned gardening event, demonstration, and contest until the end of time. Tears began to well up in Marta’s eyes, and sobs shook her frame. Dr. Sproot suppressed a smile.
“I’m sorry that it has come to this, Marta,” she said. “You should understand that not only do I have a reputation to preserve, but it’s also a matter of time. You think I have time to go gallivanting around in other peoples’ yards? I’ve got my own creations to cultivate, and I can’t take it for granted that I’m a shoo-in for this award, even though I probably am, and just rest on my laurels.
“You know how important this is to me, Marta. It’s the food I eat, the coffee I glug, and the air I breathe. I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t win. Maybe something drastic. I’ve had such a hard life, Marta. Such a hard life. This, this one crowning accomplishment, could erase all that forever. And you could share in the knowledge of how much you’ve contributed to it. There could even be a little reward for you, Marta. But you are either with me in this or against me. Now, which is it?”
All Marta could do was bow her head and nod in the affirmative.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Dr. Sproot said. “Now, Marta, my own surreptitious observations of the comings and goings at the Fremont house have indicated that there are certain days of the week and times when they are least likely to be outdoors. They are few and far between, since these Fremonts do spend lots of time puttering around uselessly in their yard and getting drunk on red wine. But even the Fremonts have to run out and do their errands every now and then. And, luckily for us, they tend to be rather regular in that regard. Come on. Let’s sit down and I’ll show you my carefully kept logs. Then you can start working. My gosh, I do believe tomorrow, mid-afternoon, could be one of your windows of opportunity. Say, two thirty to five p.m.”
An hour later, Marta walked forlornly to her car carrying a digital camera and a large shopping bag that contained the cowl, the sunglasses, additional batteries for the camera, and a thick log book. Dr. Sproot, a big smile creasing her worn and emaciated face, waved at her. This created a new sensation in Marta, a sort of carbonated bubbling up of e
xcitement and joy. When was the last time she had seen poor Dr. Sproot smile? And waving at her, too? The feelings of friendship began to rekindle in Marta as she got in the car and turned on the ignition. The purring engine reassured her and strengthened her resolve. She would do what needed to be done for her friend, and to further the institution of gardening in Livia. It was right and just.
Now, here she was in Fremontland, having terrifying second thoughts about her mission, but compelled by some force to keep going. Fraidy cat? She was no fraidy cat.
Beneath her and to the left were some shoots coming up that Marta hadn’t noticed before. She bent over, adjusted the lens of her digital camera for the close-up, and snapped away. Then, she moved back to get the broader perspective and took some more pictures. After checking the little flip-open display window on the back of the camera to make sure she had gotten the best lighting and distance to capture enough detail, she snapped it shut, and slung the camera strap back over her shoulder while she proceeded to scribble down notes and a crude map in her small spiral-bound notepad. She didn’t know exactly what it was poking up through the ground here, but Dr. Sproot would want to know, and would probably be able to identify it as soon as she saw the pictures.
What an expert Dr. Sproot was! Over the years, she had been such a sisterly helper to her in her early gardening efforts, and had selflessly shared her encyclopedic knowledge of all things botanical without charging so much as a cent.
Things had changed, of course. Dr. Sproot, always the domineering sort, had gotten more so. And so strange! Marta traced it back to when her husband, Mort, died. Mort was struck down in the prime of life six years ago by a stroke that killed him right before their very eyes, as Dr. Sproot was guiding her on a tour of some of her new creations. It was his death that had freed Dr. Sproot to be the true Nazi the good Lord intended her to be.
Mort was a lush and a lout. In that, he was an insurmountable obstacle to Dr. Sproot’s ambition of worldwide horticultural domination, and he did manage to contribute to the community’s well-being by tamping down Dr. Sproot’s baser nature. He was the only person Marta was aware of who could actually intimidate her.
Mort was a big, blustery Bluto of a man. He belched a lot and wore shirts perpetually stained with WD-40, ketchup, and something else that kept dribbling down from his mouth and dripping off his chin, and which no one but Mort could identify, but he wasn’t telling. There was the scent of flatulence and grain alcohol that always seemed to follow Mort wherever he went. It easily overpowered the muted but pleasant fragrances that suffused Dr. Sproot’s gardens.
Mort had no interest in the floral world whatsoever. He would regularly ravage Dr. Sproot’s gardens by running over the edges with his lawn mower, because he couldn’t tell a weed from a weigela shrub. This had created some tension in the childless Sproot family. Still, Dr. Sproot put up with Mort’s behavior with a meekness that never ceased to amaze those who were well acquainted with the rude, bossy side to her personality. When Dr. Sproot got her degree, Mort scoffed. When she placed third in the first of two annual Big Turkey River Regional Desert Plant Contest competitions, he sneered, even though the third-place prize was a lovely, suitable-for-framing photograph of a giant saguaro cactus with a watering can somehow attached to one of its spiky arms. Marta shook her head sadly at the thought of it.
Maybe Dr. Sproot was scared of him. Maybe she needed someone to push her around the way she pushed others around. Whatever the psychology involved here, she had always been trying to please Mort. That had involved buying sheer undergarments decorated with lace merganser heads, and Dr. Sproot’s attendance at the monster truck rallies over at the St. Anthony Hippodrome. Not even that could smooth over the roughhewn, slovenly obnoxiousness that was Mort Sproot.
It was on Mort’s sixtieth birthday that Dr. Sproot had made her startling discovery about him. She had decided to surprise him by coming home early from work with a couple six-packs of his favorite beer. She surprised him, all right. She found him cowering in their bedroom, his face all dolled up with makeup and lipstick, and wearing a pair of her pantyhose, her pink, perky, push-up bra, and a pair of frilly, light-blue panties that he must have bought or scrounged from somewhere because they certainly weren’t hers. Plus, he smelled all foo-fooey.
Marta chuckled and felt her face flush. Jasmine Bell, a licensed family counselor who had worked with the Sproots and who had no business telling her such things had told her anyway because they were neighbors and friends, and had known Dr. Sproot since they were kids.
Dr. Sproot and Mort mostly ignored each other after that. They dealt with their deteriorating domestic situation in their own self-destructive ways. Mort took to drink even more so than he had before.
A self-righteously aggrieved Dr. Sproot no longer felt obligated to kowtow to Mort’s whims. On weekends, weekday nights, and saved-up vacation days, she threw herself into her gardening with a new, tireless zeal that put all of her colleagues to shame, but added a good ten years of strain to her face and thinned her hair. That was when she invented the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend. Marta believed it to be a truly revolutionary step forward for gardening in Livia, though such a combination had never been quite her cup of tea. Dr. Sproot had dug up more than two-thirds of her existing gardens to make way for the new find. Marta marveled at how she could bring such an energy and breathless resolve to an act of sheer destruction. It was also then that she followed Dr. Sproot’s good advice to hire a couple of guys with a backhoe to dig up her deep-rooted Joe-Pye weed. She had planted it five years earlier and it had flourished. After listening to Dr. Sproot, she agreed that it was a hideous blot on her gardens.
Two years after the ladies’ underwear incident, fate struck in the form of the stroke.
Marta had been summoned by Dr. Sproot that day to witness the progress of the coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend, and arrived to find Mort downing one beer after another and playing with the propane tank attached to the backyard grill. The next thing they knew he was slurring his words and stumbling around in a semi-stupor. Typical Mort. He had taken to inhaling propane on top of his drinking, which, Dr. Sproot had to admit, made him act a little less like a brooding wannabe axe murderer. Besides, if he was willing to poison his organs and shrivel his brain, well, who was she to stand in the way of his cheap-thrill jollies, especially if they were to have the happy consequence of significantly shortening his life span. What you did was just ignore him when the fumes and alcohol took hold.
A dull thud signaled that Mort had fallen onto the relatively soft carpet of thick rye and fescue. There was some writhing, a groan, then stillness.
“We’ll just let him sleep it off right there on the ground,” said Dr. Sproot, who, despite Marta’s protests, continued to direct her attention to a particularly impressive specimen of coreopsis. When Mort didn’t get up after twenty minutes, and wasn’t snoring either, Dr. Sproot calmly walked over to his supine form. After examining it, she walked just as calmly back to Marta.
“He’s quite dead,” she said, her eyes sparkling as she emitted a gravelly chuckle. A sneer rippled across her lips. “Now, Marta, I want to show you my new yucca bed and how yucca can be used to accent your coreopsis-salvia-hollyhock blend.”
Marta shuddered at the thought of it, and how that stroke had unleashed the psychotic bitch in Dr. Sproot. She shoved her pencil and notebook in her pants pocket and adjusted the sunglasses. Poor Dr. Sproot, thought Marta. Such a sad, sad life. Such a frail individual irreparably broken by years of straining under the yoke of a foul-smelling, burping flower hater, and here I am balking at doing her a little favor or two. Still, did she have to get so mean and threatening over a little bit of hot tea?
Marta was halfway through the backyard. That meant the only escape, should someone pull into the driveway, was to make a quick dash into the woods, then somehow claw her way through those thickets to the road. She pulled the hood of her cowl across her face and tightened the drawstrings, so that only her f
orehead, nose, and sunglasses-hidden eyes were visible. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing she would normally wear on such a hot day, or on any day! And why did they have to make the bloody thing out of wool? For that matter, why, in God’s name, did she have to wear it? Wouldn’t a scarf and the sunglasses have done the job just as well? Marta wondered whether Dr. Sproot had come up with the disguise in part to further debase her, and turn her into a freak of nature, a true laughingstock. Still, she supposed it was better than being recognized, and there was that Fremont boy who had given her a ride home that day.
A pickup truck clattered by. Marta froze, turning her back to the street and stretching out her sleeve-covered arms crookedly. She hoped this posture would make her look like a small tree to the casual observer.
Once the truck was gone, Marta began to rush her job. She scuttled toward the back, searching for anything new that Dr. Sproot would need to know about. Catching the sweet smell of the dangerous angel’s trumpets, Marta inhaled deeply. She wished dearly that she could come back sometime simply as a welcome visitor to drink in the wonders of such a divine backyard. She threw back the hood of the cowl to get some fresh air, and photographed the angel’s trumpets. They had spread out since she had last seen them, and were pointing yet more deadly and fascinating blooms directly at her.
A car door slammed. Marta took off full-tilt, camera flapping at her side and her robes billowing awkwardly behind her. She dove into the woods, fought her way through the underbrush, and emerged, breathless, at Sumac Street. Making sure that no one was coming, she laid her camera on the ground, pulled her bulky steam bath of a disguise over her head, rolled it up, and wedged it under her arm.
There were some new things here to report to Dr. Sproot. She would be especially interested to know that the angel’s trumpets had grown and were still blooming wondrously. She’d want to carefully examine the roses to determine the quality of the blooms as well as the likelihood that they would still be in full flower when the contest rolled around. There were those new sprouts.
Backyard Page 6
